EMOTION-Workshop

Third International Workshop on EMOTION (satellite of LREC): CORPORA FOR RESEARCH ON EMOTION AND AFFECT. Sunday, 23rd May 2010, Mediterranean Conference Centre, Valletta Malta.
In Association with
7th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE RESOURCES AND EVALUATION (LREC 2010)

Third International Workshop on EMOTION (satellite of LREC):
CORPORA FOR RESEARCH ON EMOTION AND AFFECT

Recognition of emotion in speech has recently matured to one of the key disciplines in speech analysis serving next generation human-machine and –robot communication and media retrieval systems. However, compared to automatic speech and speaker recognition, where several hours of speech of a multitude of speakers in a great variety of different languages are available, sparseness of resources has accompanied emotion research to the present day: genuine emotion is hard to collect, ambiguous to annotate, and tricky to distribute due to privacy preservation.

The few available corpora suffer from a number of issues owing to the peculiarity of this young field: as in no related task, different forms of modelling reaching from discrete over complex to continuous emotions exist, and ground truth is never solid due to the often highly different perception of the mostly very few annotators. Given by the data sparseness – most widely used corpora feature below 30 min of speech – cross-validation without strict test, development, and train partitions, and without strict separation of speakers throughout partitioning are the predominant evaluation strategy, which is obviously sub-optimal. Acting of emotions was often seen as a solution to the desperate need for data, which often resulted in further restrictions such as little variation of spoken content or few speakers. As a result, many interesting potentially progressing ideas cannot be addressed, as clustering of speakers or the influence of languages, cultures, speaker health state, etc..

Previous LREC workshops on Corpora for research on Emotion and Affect (at LREC 2006 and 2008) have helped to consolidate the field, and in particular there is now growing experience of not only building databases but also using them to build systems (for both synthesis and detection). This workshop aims to continue the process, and lays particular emphasis on showing how databases can be or have been used for system building.

Papers were invited in the area of corpora for research on emotion and affect. Topics included, but were not limited to:

Novel corpora of affective speech in audio and multimodal data – in particular with high number of
speakers and high diversity (language, age, speaking style, health state, etc.)

Case studies of the way databases have been or can be used for system building

Measures for quantitative corpus quality assessment

Standardisation of corpora and labels for cross-corpus experimentation